Sludge sludge sludge

The worm eats upwards through the sludge but there is always more sludge

Sludge sludge sludge....

The worm reaches the top of the sludge and feels exhulted and free in the open air

Open, cold, What?

A boot covered in sludge tramples the worm back into the sludge

Sludge sludge sludge.

The worm wakes up and has a spine and remembers it’s a person,

WHY WHY WHY?

The worm steps outside and sees all the other worms

Worms worms worms

On a street corner a different worm talks about transcendence and beauty

Hope hope hope

The worm remembers it’s dream of being trampled back into the dirt

Dirt dirt dirt

It wants to tell them all that the only beauty above them is more:

Sludge sludge sludge (and boots)

In episode 2 of Sludge Sludge Sluge:  the worm gets hit by a car and as he lays in a coma in hospital he dreams of being a worm crawling up a cat's intestine... and eventually he gets pooed out into a litter tray full of sludge sludge sludge

Dead Cat Transaction

I applied for the Chorlton Arts Festival back in September with two proposals, one of a normal exhibition and the other to interfere with and distort an area of public space.  Like most applications for arts related things I listed my accolades and wrote the proposal in a way that I thought would come across as arrogant and off putting.  So I was quite surprised to be allowed to complete both of my proposals as two separate intertwined events.  So there is a lesson in that.  Coy, evasive, polite Englishness isn’t the best approach to writing artistic proposals and confidence is not necessarily arrogance.

I went to set up my “installation” or “mural” on Sunday morning at 5:30am.  At 6:30am a man came up to me asking if I had permission.  I pulled the brochure out of my pocket and opened it to the right page.  “See.  Outside Proof.  This year.  That’s me.  I’m here.”  I told him.  I asked him if he worked there and then he said he owned the building.  After which he got inside a black cab taxi’s driver’s seat and drove off.  So maybe he is the owner or maybe he just enjoys saying he is the owner of buildings.

 

Speaking of tall tales after this I was approached by Jesus Christ.  Or someone claiming to be him.  Though in reality one of Chorlton’s best histrionic old men.  He didn’t remember me speaking to him 2 years ago.  But why would he?  He has so much effort invested within his performance that the real world barely drizzles into him.   Would Al Pacino recognize you even though you saw him on the telly once?

 

I forgot my phone and was meant to be meeting the festival instagrammer some time around 9am so I had to walk home.  At this point it was all just about almost finished and I was in a sleep deprived self involved feeling of artistic fanciful freedom from the realities of flesh.  This was then destroyed when I turned the corner and saw what at first I thought was a sleeping cat.  But as I got closer noticed it was a cat with it’s organs ripped out, that had been tossed about violently and broken and spattered. 

In visions like the above you become confronted with the truth.  That underneath the clean walls and flat surfaces everything is reducible to gloop, the plastic lives we live doesn’t go anywhere beyond this surface so when the true nature of gloop and death is shown to us we just recoil because it shouldn’t exist in our tiny, self limited worlds.  The end of our lives is usually hooked up to some tubes and needles and all our conflict and war comes to whatever it rationalizations or lack of rationalizations we have.  Death is not beautiful in our culture.  Dead cats with their intestines on the pavement are not beautiful to me.  It was the biggest attack ever on my aesthetic sensibilities.  But it was the most real thing I've seen all year.

Much as this disturbed me I repressed the experience after I dealt with it.  And considering it now then I realize that the work I’ve created is in a sense attempting to operate on the level of a dead cat.  It is essentially street art designed to be inaccessible.  Unaesthetically pleasing.  Following no plastic populist Golden Ratio.  Making no references to anything but itself.  It is untidy, in terms of production, execution and in presentation.  It’s a part of me that is laughing at clock towers, mobile phone shops and hospital beds.  The dreary compartments and hospitality of the different places we phase into.  Every life a series of transactions.  Bound in a Social Contract none of us ever see or sign.   We are doing their very best to be unchallenging, appealing and boot licking too each other as possible.  That’s how you do self promotion.  “Share me, like me, want me then I will share you, like you, want you.”  Most people don’t like a dead cat.  Most people wouldn’t share a dead cat.  Most people don’t want a dead cat.

 

So come and be annoyed by my aesthetically jarring “mural” or “installation” outside of Proof in Chorlton.  Or be surprised that it doesn’t really live up to my write up of it.  And that you actually like it.  Like it.  Share it.  BUY IT.  BUY ME.  BUY ME. CONSUME (insert more counterculture anti-capitalist clichés here, perhaps a cartoon of David Cameron being spanked by Rupert Murdoch.  That would be clever.  That would affirm everything.)

 

Also I will be exhibiting at Tea Hive in Chorlton for the next few weeks.  I set up that exhibition on Monday.  So there is plenty of stuff there for you to initiate one of your many life transactions with.

Scremples

I chose not to get a new phone from EE and decided to go for a SIM only deal.

The words pass in and out carrying no personality or consequence

I find there is a perverse pleasure in keeping my old phone

Perverse?  Now this sounds interesting.

Because my screen is cracked and broken and the USB port does not work

Oh no.  This isn't going to be perverse in an interesting way.

Therefore having a phone of a bad quality that is five years old is anti establishment

He enjoys sitting in his own rubbish, he enjoys the smell of bad breath, he walks dead

The way that the camera on the phone takes very low resolution pictures

Therefore making the presentation of his work look lazy and amateur



False Statue Corroding In An Acid Bath of Linear Stuff

Evaluating myself on where I am now and in the past seems to be a useless way of evaluating creative development.  In that my current state is fluctuating and altering whereas the images produced in the past stay still until they are reused or reinterpreted in the future.  So it lacks a temporal placement for evaluation.  Something unimportant 5 years ago can become important now.  And I won't even remember where the original idea came from but the idea or image will still exist.  Existence is temporary and changeable whereas images can be fixed and (more) permanent.   Perhaps this is why I'm often working in temp jobs.  Because something about the unfixed glue of my being means that I can only adapt but never fix into place.  Never become a false statue corroding in an acid bath of linear stuff.

Uncomfortable

I've come to the realization that my artwork is in an uncomfortable inbetween place in the art world.  It is too angsty, hard edged and sharp to be considered as decorative art (the sort of canvases that the majority of people buy are soft and edgeless.  High resolution close ups of drops of water etc).  It is too messy to be able to be graphic design or illustration (close up fussy obliteration of pixelated dirt).  It is too fashionable and conceptual to be Fine Art and too traditional and full of effort to be conceptual art. 

It's almost as if I've done everything I can to create a unique product.

Program

The localization of accumulated shapes has no fixed or relevant centre and is therefore not a localization but more of a constant dribbling.  Behind this is me.  I get impatient with everything being disconnected, as it's my composition, intuitive or not, that is to blame for a lack of cohesion and a lack of reason.  Reason is celebrated these days by the people who have no belief outside of the concrete "facts" that they can read.  Plagiarized knowledge read from magazines, Google or heard in conversation with people they believe to be "intelligent".  Intelligence only being a word when someone decided to label someone who has read lots of stuff and can work things out based on the things they have been told to think.



Future Moment

Due to the process of creating collages from years of self generated materials, one of my images can actually be said to have been created over a 10 year period.  In the image above parts of it are from 2009 and parts of it are from. 2012 and 2013, but the final image itself was put finalized in 2016.  So when labelling the art, and the year it was made, it is possible that I could label with the title, price, and then a series of specific years.

The issue with this method is that I can't actually remember what years certain parts of the image were made.  So I just put the current year onto a new piece of artwork.  Though the issue with doing that is not a practical issue but a psychological one.  In that I don't feel as if I producing my own work as I am stealing the imagery from me between 2001 and 2015.

Unlike some people I am changeable and the me that I am now is not the me that I was 6 months ago.  Therefore I can renounce all responsibility for anything that I have done in the past.  So in the creation of new work forged from old work I am stealing from the ideas of someone else.  Though that person doesn't exist anymore so it doesn't matter so much.  And technically that person is me or some previous product of me.  Even if me has now become something else.

There is nothing wrong with living in the Future Moment.  People talk about the Present Moment far too much these days.  What can be done in the Present Moment?  What advances can be made?  The Present Moment slips away stupidly whenever you try to grasp it.  Attempting to influence the Present Moment is attempting to stand still on an escalator.  Whereas if I make decisions in the here and now and predict what will happen and what use the repercussions of that action will have, then I am able to create and influence the Future Moment.  Events are malleable and can be influenced therefore decreasing anxiety.

In terms of the Past Moment.  There is no need to think about that.  Especially if you have a method of collaging the past into a future.